In the works of Masilela, black people are given history and the potential to re-member their humanity and their very being.
By Busani Ngcaweni, Jeffrey Sehume and Dan Motaung
POLITICS
T
here is an African proverb which encourages the young and not-so-young to honour their elders. It is believed such homage to the elderly, who are supposed to be founts of lifelong learning, will in turn shower the young and not-so-young with life’s blessings. It is important to extend such tributes to the elders when their mortal souls are still intact, in physical form. It is worth invoking this proverb in relation to the exalted contribution to our historical memory by Professor Ntongela Masilela, an activist scholar of international repute.In historical terms, black South Africans are relatively recent arrivals in projects aimed at reclaiming the past. The burden of history has denied them the means and confidence to define the meaning of history and their place in its narrative. As it is, they are a people trapped in demands of present conditions and focused on meeting tomorrow’s needs. Stomach- level considerations tend to take precedence over intellectual pursuits, especially when such pursuits, focused on the distant past, seemingly hold out no immediate prospects for daily survival. Consequently, this inadvertent ‘inattention to the past’
leads to participation in acts of tacit legitimation of attitudes, beliefs, and dogmas excluding them from the unlimited potential inherent in history and memory. This ‘inattention’
exposes them to the Eurocentric charge that ‘Africans have never launched themselves into history’ or that cognitive faculties for reflective thought do not inhere in an African mind, and therefore Africans are passive consumers of others’ imaginative creativity.
While knowledge on and about the archivist Masilela is limited in the popular imagination, his works look set to outlive him in being monuments, records, transcriptions – published and unpublished – on a moment and time in South African history when the restrictions of state racism and academic cynicism concerning the black subject were transcended. Alas, even though he has reaped meagre rewards, one likes to believe that he takes comfort in the counsel found in
the Bhagavad Gita: “You have the right to the work but not the reward”.
In the 1940s, the learned among the young Turks who would go on to form the youth wing of the current ruling party envisioned a similar project of an Encyclopaedia on the African, and especially South African, historical process, without much success. It fell to intrepid scholars like Masilela to embark on a long journey to chronicle men and women embraced under the New African Movement (NAM) that straddled the period between 1862 and 1960. Across the oceans in the United States, W.E.B. Du Bois would plant a seed for such an Encyclopaedia which would sprout in the 1990s in the
capable hands of Henry Louis Gates and Kwame Anthony Appiah.
The organising principle behind NAM could be said to be recognition of the impact of modernity on tradition and vice versa without resorting to a vanguard of ethnic, ideological, economic or cultural purity, as befell negritude for instance. Masilela’s archival project is, by definition, a repository of diverse and multiple experiences, permutations, dialectics, geographies and objectives. It is a prescient initiative which houses the works and interpretations on /Xam personages like !Gubbu, Griqua figures such as Adam Muis Kok, all the way to Drum magazine scribes like Bloke Modisane and Bessie Head.
NAM can be characterised as an
effort to highlight in history moments of political heroism in response to imperial and racial domination and as such, it aimed for negotiation of a black presence in letters and debates driving publications like Tsala ea Batho, The Bantu World, Imvo Zabantsundu, and Ilanga lase Natali. It had an expressed political intention to challenge the apartheid state and its supportive scholarship with the result that NAM became for Masilela the “intellectual and cultural expression” of the African archive while the various political movements like the South African Native National Congress (SANNC) and the African People’s Organisation (APO) were its “political practice”.
But how was NAM different, if at all, from negritude and Afrocentricity? We would contend that the shortcomings of both these intellectual-political routes is that they are largely reactive in orientation and confined to an essentialism that does not appreciate the complexity of today’s influences like globalisation, multi-polarity, ecological concerns, and polycentric technological phenomena. NAM was firstly, reasonably cognisant of the sustainable viability of a non-racial struggle; secondly, it was represented – consciously and unconsciously – by a diversity of individuals and ideological viewpoints ranging from, amongst others, Tiyo Soga, Abdullah Abdurahman, Mary Benson, Solomon Tshekiso Plaatje, Thomas Mofolo, Mazisi Kunene and Robert Sobukwe.
To be sure, the NAM movement emerged and developed at its own tempo. There was no stated purpose to its flowering for nearly 100 years.
A historical motor driving NAM could then be described as self-generating and therefore relatively superior to that which compels business or political enterprises. In an essay entitled A Historical Purview of the New African Movement, Masilela is on the mark when he says this “bespeaks to a paradoxical relationship between culture and politics: though politics may be determinant of culture, culture is invariably superior to, and more durable than, politics”.
Professor Ntongela’s attempt to render the oppressed subjects rather than objects of history does break
The organising principle behind NAM
could be said to be recognition of the impact of modernity
on tradition and vice versa without
resorting to a vanguard of ethnic, ideological, economic
or cultural purity, as befell negritude for
instance.
POLITICS
new ground. Before his ground- breaking initiative in all instances when intellectuals of Africans descent had decided to venture into the terrain of reclaiming the past three broad patterns emerged: plainly or silently endorsing a romantic image of an unchanging African in his or her tribal garb; parroting European models of success as in, say, our schizophrenic policy decisions; or engaging in self-hating exercises that support negative forecasts about Africa’s dependency syndromes, incurable health pandemics, disregard for ethical behaviour in business and politics, and quickness to bear arms, clutching a machete as the weapon of choice.
These three historical patterns have appeared at various times in the form of the rather strident Afrocentricity of Molefi Asante, the reactive negritude movement of Leopold Senghor, and in guises of colonisation cheerleaders like Keith Richburg who would echo the 2000 Economist magazine putdown of Africa as a ‘hopeless continent’.
Arguably, common denominators about these responses are that they emerged as knee-jerk reactions with a short-term motivation at heart.
What is more is that they appeared stripped of a plain political goal of changing the inherited structures of dominance and manipulation. In his critique of retrogressive negritude, Oluwole Soyinka would ask if a tiger has to pronounce its tigerness before it can proceed with its activities of being an animal of prey. In short, to him, the task at hand should be directed at addressing objective conditions rather than tinkering with self-definitions which subsequently become wasteful navel-gazing.
Why is it important to reclaim the past using available means such as history encapsulated in the archive and monuments? The Ghanaian symbol of Sankofa urges reckoning with the past before attempting to account for the present and possible future. The location to pinpoint the living past for the entire human race was recognised by Sir Thomas Browne when he stated we “carry within us the wonders we seek without us: there is all Africa and her prodigies in us”.
It is to be recalled that the systematic denial of an African presence in the creation of a pre-colonial civilisation like the millennium-old Mapungubwe state enabled apartheid architects to relate to black residents as uncultured subjects. Such denial and removal of facts from the annals of history facilitated the implementation of segregation laws and the imposition of skewed knowledge: for example, that southern Africa was an empty land (terra nullius) without development; and sparsely occupied by innocents ready for receiving western benevolence (anima nullius).
To sustain this myth, based essentially on prejudice about people’s assumed intelligence quotient, physical and sexual abilities, popular discourse and institutionalised ‘scientific’ data was produced to sustain actions that amounted to group human rights violations. When intellectual authorities like Georg Hegel and Arthur de Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races were relied upon to support the stereotypes and accompanying acts of discrimination, the ideology of apartheid gained traction – despite retrospective protests to the contrary in some quarters – in academic journals, textbooks, and popular lore in media and other outlets.
Therefore, there is no denying the duplicitous relationship between the apartheid state and pre-democratic academia. Otherwise, how is it feasible
to contain the real history on and about the pre-colonial state of Mapungubwe whose genius was kept well-hidden for more than 70 years from those who are its rightful inheritors? Only collusion with the then-status quo would explain the purposeful silence on the topic of this civilisation that came into being and thrived in its multi-ethnic societal organisation, technological advancements, and trans-continental trade with countries such as the Middle Kingdom, China.
One wonders what would have happened had the 14th century Chinese naval explorer, Admiral Zheng He fulfilled a long-term trade relationship with inhabitants of ancient Mapungubwe. One can only conjecture if by chance this would have shifted the subsequent terms of contact between the Dutch visitors in the 17th century and, the pastoralists and hunter-gatherers of the time. Would these relationships have later facilitated a mutual development of each state- kingdom in what were obviously early examples of globalisation?
Alas, history requires events to unfold before ‘objective’ comment can be ventured.
Still, throughout this period of trying to perfect a racial polity of rehearsed authenticity in the form of Bantustans, there were individual activists in the halls of academia who made it their life’s purpose to marshal a counter- narrative. The émigré, Masilela, can be described as a 20th century version of a Denis Diderot in his ambitions of profiling the lives and works of the neglected, marginalised, erased, forgotten, and scorned African men and women not acknowledged in pre-1994 South African historiography.
It is a matter of historical record that for the industrious Diderot, the project of establishing an Encyclopaedia was meant to provide an all-encompassing summary of human endeavours in diverse areas.
The storehouse of world civilisation is honoured with the work provided by Masilela in telling of a common humanity through the NAM. In the works of Masilela, black people are given history and the potential to re-member their humanity and their very being.